Good article with some real gems such as: “It’s like recasting Jaws with a disgruntled salmon”.
Part of the underlying sag in remakes could be that truly great movies–make your own list and test this unresearched claim–don’t usually get re-made or turned into “re-quels”, do they? So far we’ve been spared “Citizen Kane: The Sledding Years” or “O Brother Where Art Thou Now?” (drawing upon the earlier film, which drew upon the Odyssey) or “Cool Hand Luke Jr.”, etc. The remakes tend to go for pretty good movies that were a financial success, though Doyle has cited some cultish, commercial-flop films that were re-made, usually to an across-the-board failure.
Nowadays, these long-unhappy remakes emerge from a moviemaking culture more averse to real risk than ever, especially in Hollywood. How many of the superhero, horror, rom-com, action-spectacle, or sci-fi/dystopian-world films of recent vintage are formulaic and derivative, in effect like contemporaneous remakes or trivially-altered versions of each other?
Doyle gets it right while writing it well: replication (like adaptation) only succeeds alongside re-invention. The movie version of Double Indemnity achieves something the book doesn’t (the film has a main character with a measure of decency and some snappy original lines; good to have Raymond Chandler do your screenplay), and vice versa.
I think it’s essentially true that there’s no new thing under the sun–to quote Ecclesiastes, from over 2,000 years ago–but you still need ought to do better than a superficial reboot with newer clothes and updated slang or “Ghostbusters: Now With Women!”.

“ Yet if the filmmakers can avoid pandering to modish identity politics”

Fat chance !

it just has to be accepted, some things are more, and sometimes much, much, more than the sum of their parts. Dad’s Army being a MASSIVE case in point. You can have all of your ducks lined up, perfectly, throw loads of money at it, polish it to a high sheen, and still fall way, way, short of the magic that was the original.

True enough that remakes are often putrid, for instance Get Carter or the Wicker Man or Rollerball or Point Break. On the other hand, I prefer the remake of that overrated kids movie, The Magnificent Seven. Payback, which is a remake of the brilliant Point Blank, is a terrific film in its own right. The Thing, John Carpenter’s remake of the 1950s B, is one of my all-time fave films. I’ve recently watched the first half of the latest version of Dune, which is much better than the David Lynch movie or the mini series from about 25 years ago; hopefully the second half of this Dune is as good. And heretical as it may be on an English website, I like the remake of The Italian Job, although I still prefer the original.

This article sidesteps the most obvious problem with modern remakes: diversity casting. It really does seem that the worst modern remakes were produced with the primary goal of providing a vehicle for black or female leads. The quality and popularity of these projects could not be lower. It’s to the point where rating sites have had to adjust their algorithms to conceal public disgust. It’s sad because film-making is one of the few American industries that hasn’t been run completely into the ground in the past 50 years.

Neither the Hollywood remake of Solaris or Tarkovky’s Russian original manage to capture the essence of Stanilav Lem’s very strange SciFi novel depicting human attemps to communicate with a planet which is essentially a living, intelligent entity.
Anyway, never mind remakes – I just wish someone would try making a movie of Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination.

Another example of the improved remake, in my opinion at least, is Ocean’s Eleven.

I for one am one looking forward to the remake of ‘The Dambusters’, and am wondering how they will refer to the Black Labrador* owned by the late Wing Commander Guy Gibson, VC, DSO.

(* Whose grave was recently desecrated by the Royal Air Force at RAF Scampton, Lincs.)

One remake that i was fully expecting to be terrible but turned out not too bad was Whisky Galore (1949 / 2016). I can’t normally abide watching Eddie Izzard but his reprieve of the slightly over-the-top army captain just seemed to work, if very different from the original.

Clooney and Soderbergh‘s Ocean’s Eleven was much better than the original Rat Pack version. Obviously they rather ruined that by making Twelve, Thirteen and Eight, but still…

Yes, Psycho (1998) is good. I like it. Correct call.

I for one would like the Cultural Appropriation of Hollywood remakes to be MORE diverse and inclusive by viewing each story through an “Earth Lens.” To utilize other properties of storytelling like silent films that showcase the Earth’s core as She/They cope with the Capitalist transformation of the planet. Otherwise moviemaking simply isn’t sustainable. This change alone would cut down film costs immensely and be better for the planet.

At this rate, there is simply no chance that Hollywood can hit all of the 2030 Goals by 2030. It’s going to require a radical transformation. A reimagining of how we think about the way that we think about inclusivity and what it means to be Earth-centered.